Former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner's bid to have his sexual-assault conviction overturned was denied Thursday by a California appeals court.

Turner was appealing his 2016 conviction for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in January 2015, for which he was sentenced to sixth months in jail, triggering protests against the judge, who was recalled this year. Turner served three months.

In July of this year, Turner's attorney argued before a three-judge panel of California’s Sixth District Court of Appeal in San Jose that Turner shouldn't have been convicted of intending to commit rape because he had kept his pants on and fly zipped and had merely sought what the defense team dubbed “outercourse,” defined in the attorney's argument as sexual activity other than vaginal sex."

But on Wednesday, the panel affirmed the conviction.

“We are not persuaded,” Associate Justice Franklin Elia wrote for the panel. (via The New York Times ). “While it is true that defendant did not expose himself, he was interrupted” and that jurors “reasonably could have inferred from the evidence” that if two graduate students had not stopped Turner when they saw him on top of the unresponsive woman, “he would have exposed himself and raped” her.

Turner, who was 19 and considered a potential Olympian at the time of the assault, lost his swimming scholarship to Stanford and is required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life because he was convicted of trying to rape an intoxicated person.

On Thursday, Turner's lawyer declined to say whether he would seek to take the case to California's Supreme Court.